other words, capable of being a "confidential" nurse. She does not know
how soon she may find herself placed in such a situation; she must be no
gossip, no vain talker; she should never answer questions about her sick
except to those who have a right to ask them; she must, I need not say,
be strictly sober and honest; but more than this, she must be a
religious and devoted woman; she must have a respect for her own
calling, because God's precious gift of life is often literally placed
in her hands; she must be a sound, and close, and quick observer; and
she must be a woman of delicate and decent feeling.

[Sidenote: Observation is for practical purposes.]

To return to the question of what observation is for:--It would really
seem as if some had considered it as its own end, as if detection, not
cure, was their business; nay more, in a recent celebrated trial, three
medical men, according to their own account, suspected poison,
prescribed for dysentery, and left the patient to the poisoner. This is
an extreme case. But in a small way, the same manner of acting falls
under the cognizance of us all. How often the attendants of a case have
stated that they knew perfectly well that the patient could not get well
in such an air, in such a room, or under such circumstances, yet have
gone on dosing him with medicine, and making no effort to remove the
poison from him, or him from the poison which they knew was killing him;
nay, more, have sometimes not so much as mentioned their conviction in
the right quarter--that is, to the only person who could act in the
matter.

CONCLUSION.

[Sidenote: Sanitary nursing as essential in surgical as in medical
cases, but not to supersede surgical nursing.]

The whole of the preceding remarks apply even more to children and to
puerperal women than to patients in general. They also apply to the
nursing of surgical, quite as much as to that of medical cases. Indeed,
if it be possible, cases of external injury require such care even more
than sick. In surgical wards, one duty of every nurse certainly is
_prevention_. Fever, or hospital gangrene, or pyaemia, or purulent
discharge of some kind may else supervene. Has she a case of compound
fracture, of amputation, or of erysipelas, it may depend very much on
how she looks upon the things enumerated in these notes, whether one or
other of these hospital diseases attacks her patient or not. If she
allows her ward to become filled with